The Autumn of 1976 was a time of significant change for a number of people, it signalled the end of my secondary school education with a rather diminished number of qualifications compared to my aspirations. However this outcome enabled me to make some decisions that led to a very positive future, rather than limping on in an environment that was not a good one for me personally. At the same time as I was coming to terms with my failures and refreshed ambition in Liverpool, a 100 miles away in Birmingham the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee were hard at work producing an alternative corporate plan for Lucas Aerospace that advocated the production of socially useful products. This was in response to management announcing the need to cut jobs, and the fact that the Aerospace industry, in the UK at least was in decline. It is sad to read some parts of the text of the plan as it tends to rail against technology which within a decade was demonstrating a capability to create work as much as to reduce jobs. However the principle of looking for new ways of utilising industrial infrastructure which allow us to move away from equipment that is designed to produce death and destruction to new forms production is surely something that we need to adopt 40 years later. One of my abiding disappointments in 2016 is the extent to which every time the suggestion is made that we no longer need a replacement for Trident, that people like Paul Kenny and Len Mccluskey rise up against the idea, simply because of its impact on jobs. Whatever happens in the next 40 years, it is clear that Trident will be a complete waste of money and will achieve nothing constructive. We need a Lucas plan for 2016 that embraces new technology in a way that the original plan did not, but argues for an alternative type of output to the production of weapons of mass destruction in the same way that the original plan did.